Digital Photo Sharing

Digital photo sharing done the right way.



From its title, what digital photo sharing is should be self-explanatory. It's basically the publication, transfer, and distribution of digital images across cyberspace, which should allow the user to share these photographs with others regardless if it is done privately or publicly. This feature is available on both programs and websites that manage the upload and display of such material. The term also refers to online photo gallery usage as a whole, because a typical online photo gallery features the online publication, transfer, and distribution of digital images (as seen in social networking sites as well as sites dedicated specifically for photo sharing purposes, which includes photo web logs or photo blogs). To be sure, photo sharing has become a lucrative industry in its own right, with many advertisers and marketers interested in breaking into the photo sharing market, while software developers are currently making propriety software to fill this need to share digital photos as well.

History of Digital Photo Sharing
In the middle to late nineties, the first photo sharing websites started appearing, specifically the ones that primarily offer online ordering of prints or "photo finishing" (at the time, printing out digital photos was still a big deal instead of leaving them online for everyone to see, which is what people are doing nowadays. From there, during the starting decade of the twenty-first century, many more photo sharing sites started popping up with the objective of providing a permanent virtual plain on which users can access and store their digital images or, in certain cases, whole video clips as well. Photo sharing has become so popular nowadays that they have become staples in social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook as well as microblogging sites like Twitter.

Flickr, Yahoo! Photos, SmugMug, Webshots, Tinypic, and Photobucket came into the scene, specifically to fill in this new demand for digital image distribution (which, incidentally, also became prominent in content-sharing sites like Livejournal, Plurk, and Tumblr as time passed). The separate sites that took advantage of this newest web trend resulted in them taking different methods when it came to functionality and even revenue generation as well. For instance, the difference between photo sharing sites and photoblogs is that photoblogs only display its pictures in chronological order, so you will have to go through its archives to see everything. In contrast, photo sharing sites allow different ways to access the photos (such as album view, slideshow view, and thumbnail view), so photo sharing sites are made to be more accessible.

Photo Sharing Today
A myriad of innovations have come to fruition since digital photo sharing first came into prominence a decade or so ago. Nowadays, photo sharing sites have the capability to add annotations—i.e., the tags and captions that Facebook is well-known for—classify photos in neat albums, and the option to add comments. The new standard for photo sharing sites nowadays—even for small sites that carry as little as a few million images for all their users—are comprehensive online organization features equal to that of a PC desktop's or operating system's photo and file manager capabilities. To be true, that's one of the main advantages that digital images have over tangible, film-developed photographs; their convenience and the ease in which they can be organized.

The best photo sharing sites out there make use of a desktop photo management scheme or software because of how intuitive they are. Even peer-to-peer (P2P) networking has jumped into the digital photo sharing train by featuring P2P-based desktop applications whose sole purpose is to house and share photos for everyone to see. The ever popular functions of drag-and-drop and the use of pre-designed templates have also been implemented among the more successful photo sharing websites. What is more, instead of going the way of faded trends like personalized websites or embedded music, photo sharing is still going strong thanks to its continued application in other mediums like cellular phone MMS, camera phone uploads, and so forth.